Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law; it is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, that is, it should rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world.
Legal realists believe that legal science should only investigate law with the value-free methods of natural sciences, rather than through philosophical inquiries into the nature and meaning of the law that are separate and distinct from the law as it is actually practiced. Indeed, legal realism asserts that the law cannot be separated from its application, nor can it be understood outside of its application. As such, legal realism emphasizes law as it actually exists, rather than law as it ought to be. Locating the meaning of law in places such as legal opinions issued by judges and their deference or dismissal of past precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis, it stresses the importance of understanding the factors involved in judicial decision making.
The United States of America is described as "home of the principal realist tradition in jurisprudence". In Scandinavia Axel Hägerström developed another realist tradition that was influential in European jurisprudential circles for most of the 20th century.
Legal realism is associated with American jurisprudence during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly among federal judges and lawyers within the Roosevelt administration. Notable jurists associated with legal realism include Felix Cohen, Morris Cohen, Arthur Corbin, Walter Wheeler Cook, Robert Hale, Wesley Hohfeld, Karl Llewellyn, Underhill Moore, Herman Oliphant and Warren Seavey, many of whom were associated with Yale Law School. As Keith Bybee argues, "legal realism exposed the role played by politics in judicial decision-making and, in doing so, called into question conventional efforts to anchor judicial power on a fixed, impartial foundation." Contemporary legal scholars working within the Law and Society tradition have expanded upon the foundations set by legal realism to postulate what has been referred to as new legal realism.
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This course will provide students with a basic knowledge of law. After an introduction to the law, aspects of tax law, environmental law, contract law, data protection or IP law will be offered, as we
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the 1970s. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups. Despite wide variation in the opinions of critical legal scholars around the world, there is general consensus regarding the key goals of Critical Legal Studies: to demonstrate the ambiguity and possible preferential outcomes of supposedly impartial and rigid legal doctrines.
International legal theory comprises a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches used to explain and analyse the content, formation and effectiveness of public international law and institutions and to suggest improvements. Some approaches center on the question of compliance: why states follow international norms in the absence of a coercive power that ensures compliance. Other approaches focus on the problem of the formation of international rules: why states voluntarily adopt international legal norms, that limit their freedom of action, in the absence of a world legislature.
Legal positivism (as understood in the Anglosphere) is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism provided the theoretical basis for such developments to occur. The most prominent legal positivist writer in English has been H. L. A.
The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty - often framed as ...
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS2023
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The Schottky monitors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be used for non-invasive beam diagnostics to estimate various bunch characteristics, such as tune, chromaticity, bunch profile or synchrotron frequency distribution. However, collective effects, ...
Iop Publishing Ltd2024
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CATS is a collaborative European project promoting driverless vehicles that ended in December 2014. This contribution explains how the project evolved, including the handling of unexpected events and concentrating on lessons learned. The constructor and ve ...